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2007 National Book Award Finalist, Nonfiction

Edwidge Danticat

Brother, I’m Dying

About
the Book and Author

In
this affecting memoir, the author tells the story
of her two fathers -- her dad and her uncle –
and her family’s own diaspora between Haiti
and the United States.

Edwidge Danticat is the author
of numerous books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory;
Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist;
The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award
winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner
Award finalist and winner of the first Story
Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

Excerpt
fromBrother, I’m
Dying

Beating the Darkness

On Sunday, October 24, 2004,
nearly two months after he left New York, Uncle Joseph
woke up to the clatter of gunfire. There were blasts
from pistols, handguns, automatic weapons, whose thundering
rounds sounded like rockets. It was the third of such
military operations in Bel Air in as many weeks, but
never had the firing sounded so close or so loud.
Looking over at the windup alarm clock on his bedside
table, he was startled by the time, for it seemed
somewhat lighter outside than it should have been
at four thirty on a Sunday morning.

During the odd minutes it
took to reposition and reload weapons, you could hear
rocks and bottles crashing on nearby roofs. Taking
advantage of the brief reprieve, he slipped out of
bed and tiptoed over to a peephole under the staircase
outside his bedroom. Parked in front of the church
gates was an armored personnel carrier, a tank with
mounted submachine guns on top. The tank had the familiar
circular blue and white insignia of the United Nations
peacekeepers and the letters UN painted on its side.
Looking over the trashstrewn alleys that framed the
building, he thought for the first time since he’d
lost Tante Denise that he was glad she was dead. She
would have never survived the gun blasts that had
rattled him out of his sleep. Like Marie Micheline,
she too might have been frightened to death.

He heard some muffled voices
coming from the living room below, so he grabbed his
voice box and tiptoed down the stairs. In the living
room, he found Josiane and his grandchildren: Maxime,
Nozial, Denise, Gabrielle and the youngest, who was
also named Joseph, after him. Léone, who was
visiting from Léogâne, was also there,
along with her brothers, Bosi and George.

“Ki jan nou ye?”
my uncle asked. How’s everyone?

“MINUSTAH plis ampil
police,” a trembling Léone tried to explain.

Like my uncle, Léone
had spent her entire life watching the strong arm
of authority in action, be it the American marines
who’d been occupying the country when she was
born or the brutal local army they’d trained
and left behind to prop up, then topple, the puppet
governments of their choice. And when the governments
fell, United Nations soldiers, so-called peacekeepers,
would ultimately have to step in, and even at the
cost of innocent lives attempt to restore order.

Acting on the orders of the
provisional government that had replaced Aristide,
about three hundred United Nations soldiers and Haitian
riot police had come together in a joint operation
to root out the most violent gangs in Bel Air that
Sunday morning. Arriving at three thirty a.m., the
UN soldiers had stormed the neighborhood, flattening
makeshift barricades with bulldozers. They’d
knocked down walls on corner buildings that could
be used to shield snipers, cleared
away piles of torched cars that had been blocking
traffic for weeks and picked up some neighborhood
men.

“It is a physical sweep
of the streets,” Daniel Moskaluk, the spokesman
for the UN trainers of the Haitian police, would later
tell the Associated Press, “so that we can return
to normal traffic in this area, or as normal as it
can be for these people.”

Before my uncle could grasp
the full scope of the situation, the shooting began
again, with even more force than before. He gathered
everyone in the corner of the living room that was
farthest from Rue Tirremasse, where most of the heavy
fire originated. Crouched next to his grandchildren,
he wondered what he would do if they were hit by a
stray. How would he get them to a hospital?

An hour passed while they
cowered behind the living room couch. There was another
lull in the shooting, but the bottle and rock throwing
continued. He heard something he hadn’t heard
in some time: people were pounding on pots and pans
and making clanking noises that rang throughout the
entire neighborhood. It wasn’t the first time
he’d heard it, of course. This kind of purposeful
rattle was called bat tenèb, or beating the
darkness. His neighbors, most of them now dead, had
tried to beat the darkness when Fignolé had
been toppled so many decades ago. A new generation
had tried it again when Aristide had been removed
both times. My uncle tried to imagine in each clang
an act of protest, a cry for peace, to the Haitian
riot police, to the United Nations soldiers, all of
whom were supposed to be protecting them. But more
often it seemed as if they were attacking them while
going after the chimères, or ghosts, as the
gang members were commonly called.

The din of clanking metal
rose above the racket of roofdenting rocks. Or maybe
he only thought so because he was so heartened by
the bat tenèb. Maybe he wouldn’t die
today after all. Maybe none of them would die, because
their neighbors were making their presence known,
demanding peace from the gangs as well as from the
authorities, from all sides.

He got up and cautiously
peeked out of one of the living room windows. There
were now two UN tanks parked in front of the church.
Thinking they’d all be safer in his room, he
asked everyone to go with him upstairs.

Maxo had been running around
the church compound looking for him. They now found
each other in my uncle’s room. The lull was
long enough to make them both think the gunfight might
be over for good. Relieved, my uncle showered and
dressed, putting on a suit and tie, just as he had
every other Sunday morning for church.

Maxo ventured outside to
have a look. A strange calm greeted him at the front
gate. The tanks had moved a few feet, each now blocking
one of the alleys joining Rue Tirremasse and the parallel
street, Rue Saint Martin. Maxo had thought he might
sweep up the rocks and bottle shards and bullet shells
that had landed in front of the church, but in the
end he decided against it.

Another hour went by with
no shooting. A few church members arrived for the
regular Sunday-morning service.

“I think we should
cancel today,” Maxo told his father when they
met again at the front gate.

“And what of the people
who are here?” asked my uncle. “How can
we turn them away? If we don’t open, we’re
showing our lack of faith. We’re showing that
we don’t trust enough in God to protect us.”

At nine a.m., they opened
the church gates to a dozen or so parishioners. They
decided, however, not to use the mikes and loudspeakers
that usually projected the service into the street.

A half hour into the service,
another series of shots rang out. My uncle stepped
off the altar and crouched, along with Maxo and the
others, under a row of pews. This time, the shooting
lasted about twenty minutes. When he looked up again
at the clock, it was ten a.m. Only the sound of sporadic
gunfire could be heard at the moment that a dozen
or so Haitian riot police officers, the SWAT-like
CIMO (Corps d’Intervention et de Maintien de
l’Ordre, or Unit for Intervention
and Maintaining Order), stormed the church. They were
all wearing black, including their helmets and bulletproof
vests, and carried automatic assault rifles as well
as sidearms, which many of them aimed at the congregation.
Their faces were covered with dark knit masks, through
which you could see only their eyes, noses and mouths.

The parishioners quivered
in the pews; some sobbed in fear as the CIMO officers
surrounded them. The head CIMO lowered his weapon
and tried to calm them.

“Why are you all afraid?”
he shouted, his mouth looking like it was floating
in the middle of his dark face. When he paused for
a moment, it maintained a nervous grin.

“If you truly believe
in God,” he continued, “you shouldn’t
be afraid.”

My uncle couldn’t tell
whether he was taunting them or comforting them, telling
them they were fine or prepping them for execution.

“We’re here to
help you,” the lead officer said, “to
protect you against the chimères.”

Gang members inside his church?
My uncle didn’t want to think there were. But
then he looked over at all the unfamiliar faces in
the pews, the many men and women who’d run in
to seek shelter from the bullets. They might have
been chimères, gangsters, bandits, killers,
but most likely they were ordinary people trying to
stay alive.

“Are you going to answer
me?” the lead officer sternly asked my uncle.

“He’s a bèbè,”
shouted one of the women from the church. She was
trying to help my uncle. She didn’t want them
to hurt him. “He can’t speak.”

Frustrated, the officer signaled
for his men to split the congregation into smaller
groups.

“Who’s this?”
they randomly asked, using their machine guns as pointers.
“Who’s that?”

When no one would answer,
the lead officer signaled for his men to move out.
As they backed away, my uncle could see another group
of officers climbing the outside staircase toward
the building’s top floors. The next thing he
heard was another barrage of automatic fire. This
time it was coming from above him, from the roof of
the building.

The shooting lasted another
half hour. Then an eerie silence followed, the silence
of bodies muted by fear, uncoiling themselves from
protective poses, gently dusting off their shoulders
and backsides, afraid to breathe too loud. Then working
together, the riot police and the UN soldiers, who
often collaborated on such raids, jogged down the
stairs in an organized stampede and disappeared down
the street.

After a while my uncle walked
to the church’s front gate and peered outside.
The tanks were moving away. Trailing the sounds of
sporadic gunfire, they turned the corner toward Rue
Saint Martin, then came back in the other direction.
One tank circled Rue Tirremasse until late afternoon.
As dusk neared, it too vanished along with the officers
at the makeshift command center at Our Lady of Perpetual
Help farther down the street.

As soon as the forces left,
the screaming began in earnest. People whose bodies
had been pierced and torn by bullets were yelling
loudly, calling out for help. Others were wailing
about their loved ones. Amwe, they shot my son. Help,
they hurt my daughter. My father’s dying. My
baby’s dead. My uncle jotted down a few of the
words he was hearing in one of the small notepads
in his shirt pocket. Again, recording things had become
an obsession. One day, I knew, he hoped to gather
all his notes together, sit down and write a book.

There were so many screams
my uncle didn’t know where to turn. Whom should
he try to see first? He watched people stumble out
of their houses, dusty, bloody people.

“Here’s the traitor,”
one man said while pointing at him. “The bastard
who let them up on his roof to kill us.”

“You’re not going
to live here among us anymore,” another man
said. “You’ve taken money for our blood.”

All week there had been public
service announcements on several radio stations asking
the people of Bel Air and other volatile areas to
call the police if they saw any gangs gathering in
their neighborhoods.

It was rumored that a reward
of a hundred thousand Haitian dollars—the equivalent
of about fifteen thousand American
dollars—had been offered for the capture of
the neighborhood gang leaders. My uncle’s neighbors
now incorrectly believed he’d volunteered his
roof in order to collect some of that money.

Two sweaty, angry-looking
young men were each dragging a blood-soaked cadaver
by the arms. They were heading for my uncle.

My uncle stepped back, moving
to the safer shadows of the church courtyard. Anne,
once a student of his school, followed him in.

“Pastor,” she
whispered, “my aunt sent me to tell you something.”

Anne’s aunt Ferna,
now thirty-seven years old, the same age Marie Micheline
had been when she died, he recalled, had been born
in the neighborhood. My uncle had known both Ferna
and Anne their entire lives.

“What is it?”
asked my uncle.

“Don’t talk,”
said Anne. “People can hear your machine.”

My uncle removed his voice
box from his neck and motioned for her to continue.

“Pastor,” said
Anne, “my aunt told me to tell you she heard
that fifteen people were killed when they were shooting
from your roof and the neighbors are saying that they’re
going to bring the corpses to you so you can pay for
their funerals. If you don’t pay, and if you
don’t pay for the people who are hurt and need
to go to the hospital, they say they’ll kill
you and cut your head off so that you won’t
even be recognized at your own funeral.”

My uncle lowered the volume
on his voice box and leaned close to Anne’s
ears.

“Tell Ferna not to
worry,” he said. “God is with me.”

Because, just as he’d
told my father, he would be leaving for Miami in a
few days to visit some churches, he had eight hundred
dollars with him that he planned to leave behind for
the teachers’ salaries. So when his neighbors
crowded the courtyard telling him of their wounded
or dead loved ones, he gave them that money. Because
many were bystanders who had been shot just as he
might have been shot inside the walls of his house,
his church, they understood that it was not his fault.
By the time it got dark, however, and Tante Denise’s
brothers urged him to go back inside so they could
lock all the doors and gates, the two corpses had
been dragged to the front of the church and laid out.
That afternoon, on the radio, the government reported
that only two people had died during the operation.
Obviously there were many more.

That night after dark everyone
gathered in my uncle’s room. He and the children
crowded together on his bed, while Maxo and his wife,
Josiane, Léone and her brothers stretched out
on blankets on the floor. To avoid being seen, they
remained in the dark, not even lighting a candle.

They could now hear a more
familiar type of gunfire, not the super firing power
of the Haitian special forces and UN soldiers but
a more subdued kind of ammunition coming from the
handguns and rifles owned by area gang members. Shots
were occasionally fired at the church. Now and then
a baiting voice would call out, “Pastor, you’re
not getting away. We’re going to make you pay.”

Using a card-funded cell
phone with a quickly diminishing number of minutes,
Maxo tried several times to call the police and the
UN alert hotline, but he could not get through. He
wanted to tell them that their operation had doomed
them, possibly condemned them to death. He wanted
them to send in the cavalry and rescue them, but quickly
realized that he and his family were on their own.

At one point they heard footsteps,
the loud thump of boots on a narrow ledge above my
uncle’s bedroom window. Maxo tightened his grip
on the handle of a machete he kept under his pillow,
just as his father had in his youth. Something heavy
was being dragged across the floor above them, possibly
the generator on which they relied for most of their
electrical power.

It was quiet again. My uncle
waited for the children to nod off before discussing
strategy with the adults.

“They’re mostly
angry at me,” he said. “They’re
angry because they think I asked the riot police and
the UN to go up on the roof. Everyone who came tonight
asked me, ‘Why did you let them in?’ as
though I had a choice.”

“Maxo,” he said,
putting as much command as he could behind his mechanized
voice. “Take your wife and the children and
go to Léogâne with your aunt and uncles.
If you leave at four in the morning, you’ll
be on one of the first camions to Léogâne.”

“I’m not going
to leave you,” Maxo said.

“You have to,”
my uncle insisted. He wanted to paint a painful enough
picture that would force Maxo to leave, not just to
save himself but the children as well. So he borrowed
an image from his boyhood of the fears that a lot
of parents, including his, had for their children
during the American occupation.

“They’re very
angry with us right now,” he told Maxo. “What
if they bayonet the children right in front of us?
Would you want to see that? Your children torn from
limb to limb right before your eyes?”

Maxo paced the perimeter
of the room, walking back and forth, thinking.

“Okay,” he said
finally. “I’ll make sure the children
leave safely, then I’ll come back for you. You
call my cell phone as soon as you can and we’ll
meet at Tante Zi’s house in Delmas.”

“You should leave with
us,” Léone persisted.

I’ll never know whether
my uncle thought he was too old or too familiar to
his neighbors, including the gang members, to be harmed
in any way, but somehow he managed to convince everyone
to leave. So when the sun rose the next morning, he
was all by himself in a bullet-riddled compound.